Post by kenji nakamura d5m {lance} on Nov 26, 2019 4:07:50 GMT -5

Family's weird.

They say family are the people you're born to, the people whose blood flows through your veins, look just like you, and are supposed to love you unconditionally. Well, mine got that down pretty well, up until I was oh, fourteen? Fifteen? I don't even remember.

What I do remember was getting awws and congratulations from my mama and papa and brother at age thirteen when I said I had kissed Leah in the middle of class and maybe possibly probably we were dating, and then two years later after she was but a distant memory in my mind I got nothing but stony glances and freezing apathy when I'd shared that I'd confessed my feelings to Julian and he maybe probably definitely had told me he felt the same way. And I'd genuinely never thought there'd be a difference, that if my family had felt one way towards me having feelings towards a girl that there'd be no way it'd be any different if I happened to be feeling them towards a guy, right?

Well, that was a nice cold slap back to reality. Something changed that day. The same loving family that'd propped me up for fifteen years and nursed my wounds whenever I taunted some big-headed jerk into a fight that I had no way of winning suddenly left me out in the cold upon the most surprising of things. Hell, I'd been supported every step of the way whenever I'd fought with a boy - so why were things so different when I suggested that I might be capable of loving one, too?

Mo took it better than my parents, I think, and for a bit all was well. But then he turned nineteen, escaped the Reapings, and moved across town to be with some girl he'd been dating for a few years. That kind of relationship was fine with my mama and papa, but apparently the kind between me and Julian wasn't quite as acceptable.

I learned later that I had an aunt not quite unlike me, my father's sister who had been notorious for leaving her husband for a woman. Of course there was no mention that this aforementioned husband was an abusive piece of shit, nor that she'd happily settled down and made a life with this woman on the outskirts of town, but such was the scandal that people like me and her, while not quite openly despised, were't tolerated in my parent's household, either.

But you know how people work. They want to know what they're forbidden from knowing once they're aware that such knowledge exists. So bit by bit, word by word, I waited each night till my father came home, tired from work and drunk from the bar, and coaxed out of him what I could. It was slow work - the nights were few and far between, and I could only ask so many questions before he got too suspicious to go on. Some nights, it was a lost cause from the beginning.

But as the war of attrition went on, I began to make more and more gains into the search for knowledge. How her name was Clara, she was my father's older sister, and that when my father had said outskirts, he meant the outskirts, as in a small cozy little cottage where she lived with her wife in a community that numbered in the double digits.

This last part I pieced together myself, for the one advantage of the indifference my parents showed me was that they rarely cared what I did with my time. So explorations beyond the suburbia where I had grown up became commonplace, then regular as I narrowed down the list of suspects to the one little community.

People always want to be helpful, and people always love to talk, so finding my aunt was easy. Building up the courage to actually approach her, well, that was a different story.

But I hadn't come so far just to chicken out at the last second. And one warm summer day, I took a deep breath, stepped up to her front door, and knocked.

Oh, it was a rough start to be sure. Confusion at a strange boy on her doorstep turned into suspicion when I explained that I was actually a nephew she had never met, son to the younger brother that had all but disowned her. But then I told the stories of Leah and Julian, the stories of shock and hurt and betrayal, and by the end of it all there were tears in both of our eyes.

But there was far, far too much to unpack in one afternoon, so I made a point to return. Trips every Sunday turned into trips every weekend to trips four days a week until I was practically heading up the hill to the cozy little cottage every day after school.

It filled me with hope and love, and courage too. Stupid courage. I became bold. I talked back to my parents, dared them to elicit any sort of emotion towards me. And they did, to the point that one day I was kicked out.

The cozy little cottage became my new home after that. Aunt Clara and her wife are the mothers I should have had. And life's not easy, but hey you know what?